


Authochthony

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:51:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vulcans, humans, flowers and madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Authochthony

It starts quietly. It starts like a tickle in the throat, like a ghost in the night. It starts when he's exhausted and the perpetual twilight is getting to him, it starts hours and months before the day a quiet Vulcan voice says, "Doctor McCoy, you will come with me."

He has been standing still for ten minutes with his hands on his ears, metal between his fingers, so when she takes his hand and leads him away, he follows. From behind him, he can feel the patient's confusion and fear, sinking into a sucking black. She takes him outside into the twilight, the trees an expanse of blurred green above him. "Close your eyes."

He does. At once, every other sense becomes more acute – the wind through the leaves more immediate, the scent of night flowers, osmanthus, jasmine, more vivid. And then he hears the screech of a handle, the clank of pipes, the gush of water. Quickly, she thrusts his hand, gloved and sterilised, into the stream. It's cold, distant from his fingers. "This is what you were," she says.

He says nothing in reply, and in one move, she pulls off the glove. This time he hisses; the cold numbs his hand down into the bone. "And this" – he's shivering now, and her voice is quiet, definitive – "this is what you are, Doctor."

*

It started with a dream. A memory, McCoy thought, made high-contrast by the gildings and stainings of his subconscious. A summer long ago, a girl in a porch swing, creaking back and forth, back and forth, a night when neither of them could sleep. His favourite dream, he was thinking, even as the cracks appeared, jaggedly synaesthetic with the wailing alarm.

A pause, and the wailing subsided and became Scotty's voice. "Sorry about that, Doctor McCoy," he crackled through the comm, "you weren't supposed to get that. Distress call at the bridge, you're wanted."

"You could've just _told_ me about it," McCoy groused, throwing off the covers and looking around the darkened room for his clothes. "All right, I'm on my way. McCoy out."

The crackling stopped, he found some combination of garments that would pass for respectable, he left the room with quick, deliberate steps, and then there were briefings and explanations, the picking of the away team, the sniping with Spock, the immediate deployment to the planet below, but all the while something lingered, something of the momentary disharmony, something of the dream.

*

Morning on Sigma Eridani, marked by the merest hint of red sunshine, and someone is shouting for help. McCoy doesn't process the wave of panic hitting his mind; he's standing up, medkit in hand and cup of coffee flying, skidding and smashing on the hard ground behind him. He's running headlong through the trees, out towards the dusky, glittering surface of the lake, and into the water.

"Doctor!" calls T'Len from behind him, her voice oddly filled with expression.

Only the jolt of the cold slows him down, along with the delayed realisation that his feet are bare and curling over the polished pebbles on the lake bed, and then, before the water is waist-deep, he's pulled the girl to him and flipped her body over. Bubbles of air escape and he can't see whether it's just trapped and inorganic or a real exhalation, but he carries her out step by step, all the way to the bank with rivulets streaming off them both. Unflappable as always, T'Len takes her from him, effortlessly places her in the care of two waiting Vulcan orderlies, and then she steps delicately back in, to where McCoy has sunk back beneath the surface, welcoming the water closing over his ears. &lt;[&gt;"Doctor McCoy," she says softly, her hands skimming in delicate lines along his skin, finding his pulse, checking the soles of his feet for lodged gravel while the water helps her support his weight. "Must you insist on behaving quite so cavalierly before breakfast?"

McCoy emerges with reluctance and consents to being helped out onto the bank. She stares down at him, solemn and impassive. He lies curled beneath the sky for a few moments before he says, "I give up, you win. Are you happy now?"

"This is not a battle of equals," she tells him serenely. "Terran doctors swear an oath that contains the words, 'In whatsoever place that I enter...'"

"'I will enter to help the sick and heal the injured,'" McCoy says tiredly. "'I will keep them from harm and injustice.'"

"Quite. The oath of Vulcan healers is shorter, but they hold this in common: in neither text is dispensation made for a healer faced with a patient who, through sheer contrariness and perversity, embraces the harm and injustice done him as though it were his firstborn. Such a healer must simply be more dedicated and ingenious in her methods."

"Is this a long and complicated Vulcan way of telling me you've got me over a barrel?"

"Not at all, Doctor. I merely state this as means to explaining that I take no pleasure in your defeat."

McCoy peers up at her, and smiles. "I thought Vulcans couldn't lie."

She says nothing, merely looks at him with quiet restraint.

"All right," he says again. "Okay, do it if you want to do it. How's the girl?"

"I will find out." T'Len stands up, gives him another long look, perhaps with some affection in it, and makes her quiet way back through into the clearing, following the path made by the orderlies through the scrub.

McCoy stays where he is. Utterly still, he can do nothing but listen to birdcalls through his hands on his ears, but when she returns, he isn't surprised. "Well?" he calls, his voice muffled by the closeness of the air.

"She will recover." T'Len sits beside him, legs crossed. "She suffered from water inhalation, which has been addressed. You were in time."

"Good," he says faintly, touches the badge of the healer on his ear, and doesn't move.

*

The natives of the world below insisted that all Starfleet medical personnel wear the traditional garb of healers on Sigma Eridani. As not to frighten the sick, they had said. It seemed a sensible notion, and the upper echelons of the command chain had no problem with it. Even Spock commended it as logical.

"Though I don't like it, Captain," Scotty confided, in a brief moment of conversation unrelated to dwindling supplies or drained dilithium crystals. "It makes me think of... things."

His actual words on seeing it for the first time were: "Ye gods, Doctor, I thought you were my Maker come to unmake me."

"A noble end for an engineer of your stature," McCoy said, and pushed back the cowl. A stripe of shadow covered his eyes, and he said nothing else on his way out.

Now, watching him sit quietly in his chair, Kirk thinks his chief engineer is doing a remarkable job of not saying _I told you so_. In the twilight of the world, McCoy barely registered as a presence onscreen, but something of the same transience is lingering on him even without the technology distancing him, even as he paces the briefing room, hands clasping and unclasping with each turning step.

"The situation is just as it was reported, with some nuances," McCoy is saying, and Kirk forces himself to stop being fanciful and listen. "Before anyone looks at my outfit and starts making noises about the Prime Directive, there are some things you've got to know about Sigma Eridani."

"Doctor," Spock says, "if I might interrupt, Sigma Eridani is the appellation of the star. The true name of the planet is Sigma Eridani V, to indicate its place in the planetary system."

"The true name of the planet," McCoy says caustically, "translates into Federation Basic as 'water', seeing as how the inhabitants had more literal-minded ancestors than we apparently did. But you feel free to call it what you'd like, Mr. Spock."

"As you wish, Doctor." Spock is serene.

"As I was saying," McCoy continues, "you've got to know that the natives here aren't too fond of technology as a way of life. They've got it, they've got faster-than-light travel, but they've also got a pretty world and no reason to leave it. And so I guess we wouldn't have heard from them at all if this plague hadn't been visited upon them."

Kirk watches him move, watches how well the depths of his hood hide his eyes. "Tell us about that, Bones. Is it going to be a danger to us?"

"There has been only one alleged case of transmission of the disease between species," Spock tells him, and makes a pretence of consulting his data. "Between one of the natives of Sigma Eridani and an Earth-born human. The human in question was Doctor McCoy."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Spock." McCoy sounds, if possible, more exasperated than usual. "I had a misadventure in the lake. It was nothing to do with the plague. What've the Vulcans been telling you?"

"Doctor," Kirk says quickly, before an argument can develop. "The plague. What are the symptoms, how is it transmitted?"

"It's mostly harmless," McCoy says, contemplative. "Initially, a sufferer finds it hard to concentrate, starts drifting off mid-conversation. A few of them have exhibited narcolepsy in the early stages. Unusual, unsettling, but not especially worrying. But after some days of this, they begin to sleepwalk. And invariably, they head for open windows, open water, laser scalpels and sharp knives. It's never purposeful, or at least it never seems that way, but then some of them never wake up."

Kirk shudders slightly. "And you..."

"There have been _no_ cases of interspecies transmission," McCoy says firmly. "All sufferers are being relocated to a quarantined facility on the northern continent, because we don't know yet how it's catching. There are several Sigma doctors, a veritable army of healers from the _Intrepid_, and yours truly, all busy working on a cure. As is Spock's department."

Kirk finds himself relaxing a little, all of a sudden. He knows that tone of voice; it's cranky, it means McCoy just wants to be left alone until he gets the job done, and the job will get done. "We're only checking in, Doctor," he said, as lightly as possible. "How's it going down there?"

"As well as you can expect, when you put me with a bunch of pointy-eared epidemiologists and expect us all to get along." He makes a gesture that apparently indicates multitudes of invisible Vulcans; through the billows of the cloak, it's difficult to be sure.

Spock is still serene. "I was under the impression, Doctor, that you and T'Len were, as you say, 'getting along.'" His voice is impassive, but in its very impassivity, Kirk can sense the quiet, almost human motive.

"We are, Spock." McCoy sounds tired. "She's a very good healer. She and I are – well, we're doing what we can." He sits down and keeps his hands clasped together.

"Anything else?" Kirk says.

McCoy shakes his head; Spock inspects his notes and says, "No, Captain."

"Right, keep me apprised, both of you." Kirk nods at them, and then risks a quick glimpse down the table. Scotty peers back at him, but his expression is unreadable.

McCoy is shifting in his seat. "I should go back down to the surface, Captain."

"Of course. Good luck, Bones."

McCoy nods, and seems about to say something before he gathers his papers and sweeps out. The abruptness of the movement startles Kirk – he looks up at Spock, who says nothing, and then glances across at Scotty, who catches his eye and nods.

"Yes," Kirk says aloud, and no one asks what they've just agreed on.

*

Curling, witchy tendrils of fog in every direction weigh heavily on the spirit. Also on the lungs, and McCoy sneezes. In its molten youth, the fifth planet of Sigma Eridani suffered a collision with an asteroid, leaving the planet's axis parallel to the elliptical plane, knocked wildly off balance. In the resulting climate, the perpetual misty twilight, McCoy is thinking he has a pretty good idea of what that felt like.

"I couldn't help but notice," T'Len says, as he fumbles for a handkerchief in the sleeves of his cloak, "that you did not see fit to inform your colleagues of this recent development."

"And I have no intention of doing so, either." He sneezes again, less violently. "Do you know, this fog can't be healthy for anyone, Sigma native or not. No wonder people keep getting ill."

"Doctor McCoy," says T'Len gently, and she stops walking, waiting for him to look at her. "This is unusual, and cannot be easy."

"No, it isn't. And it won't be any easier if Starfleet finds out and hauls me in for the usual battery of tests. I'm needed here, to do my job, and I can do my job."

"That is so." T'Len nods. "And yet, I might still question its flawless logic."

"You do that. I'm staying right here." McCoy looks at the ground, looks at the sky, thinks about molecules and science and how you could take him apart with tweezers and never find his oaths within him. He can feel the closeness of people, even though the world is still dew-washed and early-morning silent. Surprising himself, he laughs. "Is this what they meant, 'the garb of the healer'?"

T'Len smiles at him. "It is possible, our linguists assure me, that the phrase may have connotations beyond the literal."

"_Now_ they tell me." He pauses, thinks some more. "I suppose Spock _is_ wrong? I mean... I don't have the disease?"

"It is unlikely," she tells him, and her scrupulous honesty is a comfort. "I could perhaps consider the possibility that there is a connection between events as they have transpired. But it would seem as though some other feature of this world has led to your... transformation."

"Is that what we're calling it?" he asks, waspishly, then regrets it. "How did you know what I told Spock and Jim, anyway?"

"During the course of this project, briefing reports are being copied between the _Enterprise_ and _Intrepid_. I merely called and asked, as you might say."

He laughs again. "Always so efficient. Don't you ever sleep, T'Len?"

She doesn't answer for a moment, and they keep on making their circuit of the encampment, taking in the edges of the clearing, the hospital buildings distant but visible. The path is well worn, and McCoy fancies he can hear the soft, soothing ripples that mean they're coming close to the lake.

"Doctor McCoy," T'Len says, just as they round behind a tree and the water rushes into sight, "you must allow me to help you."

"I already agreed, didn't I?" He leads her down to the water's edge and sits, feet dangling perilously close to the edge. Looking across to the horizon on the far side, he realises all at once that the sky is clear; the twilight makes it look continuously overcast, but there's a lack of humidity in the air, a sense that they are here beneath an atmosphere open to space.

"Yes," T'Len says softly. "There is a Vulcan proverb: know what you do. Do you know what will happen if I do this? And do you know what will happen if I leave you how you are?"

"T'Len," he says, formally, "I consent."

He shifts to make room for her, and she sits down delicately, holding up her hand. McCoy takes it. "Thank you."

They stay in silence, listening to the world wake up.

*

There's diplomacy, Kirk thinks. There's always diplomacy, and a ship to run, and reports to read and, depending on mood, Klingons to bait or chase; there are always Vulcans to pacify and always Starfleet Command to placate. There is always the blackness of interstellar night, the chill of space licking the _Enterprise_'s hull. There are things to think about during the daytime, and then there are the after-dark things, the important ones.

"He's doing a good job, Spock," Kirk says, in the quiet of the observation deck, long after the ship's artificial evening has begun to draw in. Around them, various crew members, coming off shift, going on shift, wandering through insomnia, murmur at their tables. It is peaceful here.

"You refer to the doctor." Spock is silent a moment, putting down his spoon. The plomeek soup in front of him looks oddly domestic, Kirk thinks. It makes the whole conversation seem a parsec distant from the bridge. "I concur with that assessment."

"Hard to see how you couldn't." Kirk considers it. "This is a bad business however you look at it. This sort of thing always is. But the Sigmans – they're out of the worst, aren't they? Bones and the Vulcan – what's her name, T'Len? – they'll see it through to the end."

"It is probable," Spock says, "that the people of Sigma Eridani V could have made progress in arriving at a cure were it not for the uncertainty regarding the transmission of the disease. The species immunity enjoyed by humans and Vulcans may have be our only advantage in the continued search for the cure. Regardless, it is fortuitous that the _Enterprise_ should have been within hailing distance."

"I agree, and doubly fortuitous that Starfleet saw fit to let us hang around. But you know, Spock, that's that not what we're talking about."

"Enlighten me, Captain."

"Bones." Kirk is definite on that point. "Spock, he spooked Scotty, and that's hard to do. He's not himself, and you've noticed. Don't think I didn't see what you were trying to do there."

Spock looks at him, with that same flavour of impassivity that Kirk saw in the briefing room. "It is unlike Doctor McCoy to forgo an opportunity to bait me."

"Don't I know it." The grin only lasts a few seconds before he feels it slip off his face into the dimness of the room. "But you understand, I think. Bones is, shall we say, beginning to worry me. In the ordinary course of things I only worry that I'll wake up in the morning to find you and he have killed each other over a disagreement in semantics. This is different."

Spock hesitates, briefly. "Captain, there are matters of interest to both Vulcan and human exobotanists in the transpiration mechanisms of many species of plant life on the planet."

"Spock, have you even heard what I've been saying?" Kirk is thinking about McCoy twice, now; the shadowed doctor on the planet below, overlaid by the vision of him as he would be, here in this dim light holding forth on Vulcans being more akin to plants than people.

"Perfectly, Jim." Spock is quiet. "It would be worth my while as science officer to perhaps take a small team and make some brief observations on rates of xylem water loss. And perhaps, while I was there, I might occasionally have reason to consult with Doctor McCoy, who has, as you know, considerable research training. In the course of this endeavour, it is of course feasible that my conversations with the doctor might deviate from matters scientific."

Kirk takes a deep breath, then lets himself smile. "Mr. Spock, you surpass yourself. Pick your team, inform the Intrepid and beam down whenever you're ready."

It's hard to make out Spock's expression in the starlight from the observation windows. Kirk sips his tea, and sits in comfortable silence as Spock finishes off the soup.

*

McCoy sits cross-legged on the ground, irritable, apprehensive. T'Len touches his head and sprawls beside him. The contrast is strange and stark; the human rigid, straight-backed, the Vulcan relaxed, head propped up on her elbows. With care, she reaches for an earthen teapot such as the Sigmans use, and pours out a steaming liquid into a cup with no handle. "Drink this," she says, and he takes the cup and sniffs at it.

"What is it?"

"The closest Earth equivalent would, I think, be osmanthus tea. Drink it."

Holding it in both hands, he sips it. The heat seems to relax him; some of the tension falls away from his body, and his fingers visibly curl. He breathes the steam and says nothing.

"All right." T'Len sits up and holds up her hands. "May I?"

McCoy nods, and her fingertips touch his. They sit still, letting seconds pass. T'Len says, softly, "You know what I am about to do, Doctor."

"Do it."

There is no sound save the birds, high above the clearing, and McCoy's breathing, measured, then getting quicker, and quicker still. T'Len removes her hand and reaches for the cup, putting it back in his unresisting hands. "Drink this."

He takes another sip, mutely, automatically. "Think about the tea," she says quickly, "think about the flowers that were used to make it. Think about their scent. Think about the people who picked them and crushed them. Think about the cup in your hands, think about the liquid in your mouth. Think about physiology and nutrition. Think about the tea."

There is pain in this world, and despair, and fear. McCoy breathes it in, lets it wash over his thoughts. The breaking melancholy of illness, the sharp tang of pain, of loss. A girl nearby is having a dream about birds of paradise. A Vulcan – he recognises the sleek mental surface brushing against his own – thinks of logic, of computation, of beauty. A woman grieves a daughter lost to the disease. Two people, hidden in the trees, are having sex; there's a bright twin nova burst that makes him tremble before it fades into afterglow. Someone is hungry, someone wistful, someone else wants salt in their soup. The twilight blurs edges, makes him think in strange angles about where he begins and ends: if a thought is a thought without a mind to hold it, like water holding its shape outside of a glass, and then about what human is, and Vulcan, and animal, and what life is, what hurts and perceives in the low-level burn of forest canopy. Life begins and ends in and beyond him, the plague is a dirty shadow of a thing, somewhere there are flowers.

"Osmanthus," he says, softly.

"Who are you?" she raps out.

The darkness between the spiral arms of the galaxies coalesces, whirls down a plughole and becomes the dark behind his eyes. "Leonard McCoy," he says, tasting citrus and iron. He sounds irritable again, and feels it too; the tangible world is somehow too much for him, like sandpaper against skin. "Chief Medical Officer, USS _Enterprise_."

"Well done." T'Len almost smiles. "Well done, Doctor. It is not easy, to lose oneself for the first time and yet hold one's mind as one's own."

"It hurt," McCoy says, feeling human and somewhat petulant. "It hurt a lot."

"Less, with time. Finish that, you need the hydration."

He lies back and drinks the last of the tea. In the shadows at the edge of the clearing, Spock frowns, lingers a moment more, and disappears into the trees.

*

Eventually, like lake water rising over a village, exhaustion floods over his awareness of everyone and everything, and he falls asleep under a heap of blankets on a hospital cot.

"Your watch, Doctor." An unnamed Vulcan touches his shoulder and he rolls over into consciousness; there are holes in the fringes of his mind, he notes as the world reasserts itself, tiny things, like gaps in a window you only notice in the rain.

The messenger nods and disappears. Another cup of that unholy tea – crushing flowers must be a spectator sport on this planet, or at least on those bits of this planet which aren't lucky enough to be in a quarantined perimeter in the middle of a forest – and he's slipping out into the ward, watching T'Len watch him come closer, as if he might pounce at any minute, as if he's the overgrown domestic cat in this scenario, as if he could do anything at all with the echoes of a thousand beneath his thoughts.

Watch the knife-edge, she told him today. T'Len's knife is a ceremonial relic. Like a scalpel without a laser. Watch the knife, thinks Leonard McCoy, and lifts a fifty-millilitre beaker full of clear liquid and puts it down on the edge of a bedside table, half a centimetre from the edge. Astringent, but no meths. Fits the shape of the glass, makes its own edges. He saves it for later.

The first patient of the night is a girl named after a flower. They all are – lilies, poppies, mimosa, purred in liquid vowels - and the translation mechanisms crank the beautiful words into bland Basic. Elegant as a computer programme, and poetic as, too. He touches her head, briefly, hears her voice as close and intimate as if it were his own – save me, she says, and he says, out loud into the blue-lit silence, "I'm trying, darlin'" – and pulls the blanket straight and leaves the meds regimen alone, because she's not walked into that good night yet and that's as much as can be hoped for right now. The people of Sigma Eridani have skin so white it's almost translucent, the lines of veins showing just beneath the surface, and their eyes are all iris, blue and green, with single stripes of fur, blue-tinged white, running the length of their bodies, sinuous and sleek. When they're healthy, they look like solemn, beautiful felinoids with effortless grace woven into their movements. McCoy has seen pictures.

The illumination panels make him feel like he's underwater. Fitting, he thinks; he's losing his head in a sea of thought, it fits that all of this happens in a blue-shifted world. His eyes stare out of reflections in glass, too bright, too accusatory. It's easier to navigate through closed eyelids, following the sound of the soft-edged murmurs, to the next one, a male – named after a tree, that's new – who's been tied with soft rope to the edge of the bed. Makeshift, but it'll keep him from launching his body – organic, vulnerable, soft and hard to sew back together – off the roof of this building with a caterwaul of joy. Last night McCoy heard it in his bones, and ran, and got his arms clawed raw for his trouble, and this time they're trying the restraints. He looks at the chart with a critical eye. Prognosis: the same. Diagnosis: no damned idea. Sedatives, he thinks. Could do with a few of those, himself.

Moving on. It's interesting, biologically. Sigman blood is like glucose syrup, without all the garish red and green of Terrans and Vulcans, and it's patient number three who gave McCoy most of his firsthand experience. The whole corpus of medical staff is eating with plastic cutlery now. The chart has neat Vulcan copperplate all over it; he doesn't want to bring his Earthborn mess anywhere near it. Patient number three is fast asleep. She's only a little thing and she misses home, McCoy thinks idly; she lives in a city, although from what it looks like in her head, apparently cities on this world have more trees than a lot of Terran national parks, and she's been here too long. The wounds will heal, he's seen to that. It's just that there's more beneath the surface where they came from.

"Doctor," T'Len says softly. An acknowledgement of his presence, nothing more. They're very close now, close enough for him to know to hang back, to keep his distance. Almost lazily, he sinks into mental noise for a moment, feels homesickness, despair, confusion, and through the amorphous chaos, something like a cat's cradle, something very neat and controlled, but strained. T'Len is calm inside and out, but the frenetic mess of human is getting to her. He sighs, and regrets it, knowing she'll feel it.

"I'm only doing rounds," he says, all businesslike. "I've had a nap, I'll take any accidents that come in."

She nods. "My thanks."

Before she turns away, she holds up her hand. He takes it, weak, and stands in silence as she draws a curtain across his frenzied world, gives him a shield and a measure of calm. She lets go and he breathes in, breathes out.

_Should have stopped her_ – and the thought is very much his own. Doctors and Vulcans, he thinks, always with that streak of self-sacrifice a mile wide, and he turns away and moves back into the throng.

*

Spock does not dream often, and when he does, he rarely remembers his dreams. He has read about the human phenomenon of lucid dreaming, and he wonders if this may be some related event, perhaps due in part to his complicated genetics. He understands the way the brain may take elements of everything it has ever processed and draw them together into new wholes – he has even read Terran histories which talk of dreamlike figures, human but for their white-feathered wings – but he does not understand this new type of consciousness, this place he remembers and is seeing for the first time.

The water is warm, red-tinted from the sandstone it wears down on its journey across land. The vegetation is lush and plentiful, the sky blue at the zenith, fading to white at the edges. Despite the heat, it is not like the deserts Spock knows; it is humid, almost obscenely fecund, drawing water liberally from every green living surface. To Spock, it seems alien.

The change takes him by surprise. Suddenly, there is a sharpness in the air, the taste of ice. It comes with a howling gale – and this, Spock notes, is the legendary irrationality of dreams – and the trappings of a blizzard, but rather than the natural progression of cold air and precipitation, it is as though the landscape were suddenly made subject to a flash-freeze. Snow crystals are freezing out of the air, the foliage transformed into translucent sculpture. Spock can picture the centimetres of mercury falling, and now the cold is such that it has become difficult to draw breath into his lungs; he will drown, here on dry land, in a world that is not his own.

He realises that he's running down to the edge of the river, chasing the last of the open water, the last trace of summer, and as he realises it, the dream begins to break. He wakes up to find himself in the camp on Sigma Eridani, the last of the embers still radiating slight heat in the dim light. His heart rate slows, and his internal body clock tells him that it will be two hours and ten minutes until the dawn.

Spock sits up. Doctor McCoy is standing behind him.

McCoy doesn't speak, and he is standing still. With a start, Spock realises why the presence behind him is muted; for a human, his body temperature is too low.

"Doctor?" he says quietly.

"Yeah, Spock." McCoy sounds weary, long on shift. "I'm sorry if I woke you."

"You did not." With difficulty, Spock adds, "How goes your work?"

"The way it always goes, in the end." McCoy says. His voice is soft, dreamy in the darkness.

"I don't understand," Spock says. "To what are you referring?"

"New life, new civilisations." He pauses. "They join the Federation and the diplomats sign the treaties, and then the scientists are sharing data and the cultural specialists are taking great dives into each other's libraries and the engineers are off doing, I don't know, whatever it is engineers do."

In his left hand, he holds a Sigman beacon. It activates in response to his touch, and McCoy throws back his hood, holds up the shining white light and brings it around in one long pendulum sweep. _All's well_, for settlements and satellites to see. Even _Enterprise_'s sensors will make out the flare. It means the quarantine camp has made it through another day.

McCoy walks around the embers, carrying his light. "And they put me in my lab with the new humanoids and we compare notes on the traditional scourges – the old cancers, sexually transmitted wasting diseases, that kind of thing. And then we've been at it a couple of hours, and they turn to me and they tap their heads in a significant kind of way, and I stare back and shrug. No, we don't know what to do about that, either – and the look of disappointment? That's always the same, too."

"Doctor," Spock says, "I fear the thread of your thoughts is reaching beyond even my powers of comprehension."

"No, it isn't, Spock." McCoy is impatient, but the thread of affection is more vivid than usual in his voice. "It isn't at all, and you know it."

The beacon darkens, and the dying firelight is once again the only source of illumination. "Doctor," says Spock, quickly, "you..."

McCoy interrupts, smiles at him. "I have a job to do."

He turns and walks back inside. Spock closes his eyes and tries to sleep, but the dream is beyond him; he lies still and awake, thinks about deserts until the dawn.

*

The lights in sickbay are low. In select places all over the ship, engineering allows for an illusion of night, using low-lighters and softened lines in place of real twilight, but sickbay isn't usually one of them. Kirk pauses by the doorway and hesitates a moment before speaking; it's enough time for Nurse Chapel to emerge out of the shadows and give him a stern glare. "Please don't," she says quickly, before he can say anything to the computer. "I want it to stay dark."

Kirk stands in the doorway, letting the light from outside into the room, and realises he's found McCoy. The doctor is on one of the gurneys, curled up and asleep facedown in the dimness. The gentle illumination shows up the soft shape of the cloak, wrapped over his body so only his head is visible.

"I don't think he's been sleeping," Chapel says. "I want him to stay where he is until he wakes up. He can shout at me for it later."

Kirk laughs as quietly as possible. "'Physician, heal thyself.' He never has been very good at taking his own advice."

Shaking his head, he turns to leave, but in the movement, he sees the light catch something, a flash of metal somewhere near McCoy's head. "Nurse," he calls quietly.

They step into the room and Kirk inhales sharply. Closer to, he can make it out: a sharp spike, oxidised silver, driven through the cartilage of McCoy's ear. "Is that," he demands, almost forgetting to keep his voice low, "what I think it is?"

"Depends on what you think it is, Captain," says Chapel distractedly, clasping and unclasping her hands. "It can't be – I mean, a wound like that would be much more..."

"Painful?" suggests a new voice. McCoy rolls over and peers sleepily up at them both. "Why are you both watching me sleep? And why am I asleep, for that matter?"

"Bones," – Kirk feels ridiculous, but presses on anyway, "your ear..."

Swiftly, McCoy reaches for the offending object and Kirk hears something click. Seeing it in two pieces in McCoy's palm, Kirk understands: the object is held in place by strong magnets, joined together to create the illusion of a continuous spike. "Yet another piece of ritualistic chicanery I'm obliged to participate in on that godforsaken planet," McCoy says, voice still thick with tiredness. "If that had really been driven through my ear, you'd have heard about it before now."

"I'm sure I would," Kirk says, and smiles at Chapel, who looks a little perturbed that her plan has been foiled.

"Goodnight, Nurse," McCoy says pointedly, and she gives it up.

"I wish you'd sleep," she tells him, and makes a quick exit. Kirk smiles to himself as her footsteps recede down the corridor.

"She has a point, Bones," he says gently. "She's concerned about you, and if she wanted to leave you asleep in here, I wasn't going to complain."

"I only came onboard to check on a few things," McCoy says, stretching out. "I sat down for one moment, and, well." He makes an imprecise gesture, probably meant to indicate imminent unconsciousness. "I guess I'm tired."

"Yes, I guess you are." Kirk is deliberately keeping all emotion out of his voice. "And I'm not surprised you are, and I'm also not surprised you're not letting yourself rest. That's just like you."

"There's a 'but' coming," McCoy says, not without humour. He makes no move to adjust the light levels; they are still sitting in near-darkness, with only the light from the open door spilling in a pool around their feet.

"However," Kirk says, "there's something you're not telling me, isn't there? And whatever it is, it isn't good."

McCoy looks at him, looks at his own hands, looks at Kirk again with something steady in his expression. "It isn't important, Captain."

"Let me be the judge of that." Kirk gives up the attempt at dispassion, goes for honesty. "Leonard, I've no right to force you to tell me. I'm asking."

"Yeah, you are." McCoy sounds tired, and he draws his feet up onto the gurney, hugs his knees. "And you don't know exactly what it is you're asking, I think."

"I believe it. But as someone who's known you a very long time, I'm asking."

McCoy breathes in, exhales. Several seconds pass, and then he says, "Jim, you're worried about me. You're thinking that you've seen me this pale before, this tired, but never so quiet, and that worries you. You're hungry. You're wondering if Spock has had dinner yet and if he would mind you joining him. You're thinking that if someone has hurt me in any way, you'd quite like to feed them to Spock for dinner."

Kirk raises his eyebrows, but before he can say anything, McCoy goes on, "I can tell you something similar for everyone on the ship. On the planet, I can feel the thoughts of all the patients, all the healers. I can feel the presence of every living thing."

Kirk takes a deep breath. "You mean... now?"

"Not everyone, now." McCoy chuckles weakly. "I need to make a conscious effort to do it, most of the time. I get flashes, though. You're thinking about me, so I hear you – I guess it's like hearing your own name across a room. The _Intrepid_'s CMO, T'Len, she's been helping me with it, but we don't know all the details of it exactly just yet."

Kirk is still taking deep breaths, both physically and inside his head, in and out, thinking, processing. "Does Spock know?"

"He's guessed, I think." McCoy rocks backwards. "Hasn't said anything, but that's his way – privacy in all things, but especially things like this."

"Right." Kirk takes one last consciously deep breath. "Bones – when did, how did, how could this happen? And how can you – oh, I don't know."

"That's pretty how much I feel about it." McCoy sounds lighter than he did, and his eyes have some snap and sparkle in the dimness. "How did it happen? I don't know. T'Len thinks maybe I have some dormant talent that way and something about the plague's gotten into me, made it blossom. Me, I'm not so sure. But we both figure I'm stuck with it at least for the time being, so I'd better learn to cope."

Kirk thinks about that for a while, horribly aware of McCoy's presence for a few moments, before he remembers the doctor's hands are gentle, and his mind is too, beneath the acerbic crackle. "What's it like?" he asks, and he's genuinely curious.

"Honestly?" McCoy looks straight at him. "It hurts a lot. T'Len is afraid of, oh, all kinds of things. I might lose my sense of self after a while. Luckily for all of us, I have a very pronounced sense of self."

There's still humour in it, but quiet, sharp-edged. Kirk shivers a little. "But you can feel..."

"Everything." McCoy is thoughtful. "I can't exactly read your mind all the time, but I'd know straight off if you were lying. With practice, I could be more precise, apparently. I think," – and this is the first time, Kirk realises, that his voice has been anything other than level – "I'd rather not."

There is silence for a moment, while Kirk deliberately resists the temptation to think something in McCoy's direction. He has a half-formed idea that it would be rude, an intrusion, like smashing into someone's quarters without knocking first.

"You know what this is?" McCoy says suddenly, holding something up. Kirk realises it's the magnetic spike, still clutched between his fingers. "At one time in the history of this world, they were afraid their healers would succumb to illness along with the general population. So as proof they were survivors, that they wouldn't easily sicken, they pushed spikes of metal through their flesh and let the wound heal around the foreign object. If it turned septic and they died, then, well, they wouldn't have been a good healer anyway."

Kirk looks at him, says nothing.

"It's a good-luck charm," says the doctor, softly. "Against the death of every sparrow."

Watching him, Kirk sees the shiver pass through his body. "You should sleep, Doctor," he says, quietly as possible. He stands up and walks to the door, looks back into the room. "Stay onboard tonight."

McCoy shakes his head. "Can't do that. I need to…"

"No, you don't." It doesn't matter, Kirk thinks immediately, fiercely. Nothing matters but the soft peace in this room.

The fight goes out of him quickly. Kirk watches McCoy give in and curl up on the gurney, drawing his limbs up beneath the cloak. Kirk lingers long enough to hear his breathing begin to slow down, and wonders, and worries, all the way back through the silent ship.

*

Sitting in a porch swing that was built at the turn of the century, McCoy thinks, clearly, vividly: this is his favourite dream. It has the blurry immediacy of a dream, it has the vivid touch on skin of summer heat, of layers of humidity beneath the sweltering sky. Too hot to sleep, he remembers; he got up and padded around the silent house, the floorboards creaking beneath his bare feet, and he pressed his hand to the glass of the front door and watched the perfect outline of his fingers form on the surface, loops and whorls with the night showing translucently through.

Beyond the glass, beyond the screen door, he stepped through into the dark and waited for a breeze that didn't come. The swing was creaking back and forth, long slow movements, and he remembers seeing the single foot slip beneath it, pushing lazily off the boards, and he remembers noticing the pink polish on the toenails. "Is that you?" she said softly, and the dim moonlight was enough to show her face white against the dark, the marks of the Trill a contrast on the sides of her throat. She had the middle-of-the-night look, amusement made soft at the edges by sleep, and moved to let him in beside her, entangled her limbs with his, skin to skin with layers in between of sweat and feverish heat. The swing creaked.

He wakes up before sunrise, with her body curled and relaxed beneath him. There is a new chill in the air, something harsh and uncertain after the long, sticky Southern night, and he gets up silently, without disturbing her, and steps out into the trees. They seem to loom through tendrils of fog, and he realises all at once that there's a freshness in him, as though he's slept long and comfortably, as though the sun has held off rising for his benefit. Leaves crackle beneath his feet; there are low shrubs and bushes and flowers that he doesn't recognise. He walks more quickly. On the night he dreams about, the summer night on the porch swing, he was twenty years old. He feels older than that now.

By the lake, he comes to a stop and notes dispassionately that there is a red tint above the horizon. A girl with ears like a cat's is sitting on a rock by the water's edge, staring intently into the depths. Humans, he is sure, have never mutated in this fashion, and Emony used to laugh at him, filled with affection for her Terran lover full of dreams and exozoological trivia, but she feels very distant from him, sleeping years and light years away from where he's standing now.

He sits cross-legged on the ground next to the girl. "You're an–"

*

"–alien," she says, and knows as she says it that it is true. He has curved, shell-like pinnae, an unusually substantial dermal layer and a low centre of gravity. Terran, she thinks; Earthborn human, most likely. He sits in silence, looks up at her with the slight grimace that passes in his race for a smile.

After some time, she says: "Where am I?"

He is thoughtful, taking his time. "My scientists call this world Sigma Eridani V," he says, precisely, and she notes that the movements of his mouth match the words; somehow, he has learned her language, or she has learned his. Perhaps they merely understand each other.

"It's my home," she says, matching his precision. "Where is this place?"

"It's a quarantine hospital camp." He sounds weary. "You're here because you have a disease. We're still working on what it is exactly, or how it gets passed on."

"Am I going to die?" she asks, quickly.

"Depends. What were you planning to do, sitting here by the lake?"

She thinks about that. The water before her is black, impenetrable, with weeds tangling through the shallows. "I don't know," she says, honestly; she can feel something in herself, an image of the surface closing over her head, and a bone-deep response. It would be easy, and comfortable.

"That's fair." He pauses, then stands up. "Can I take you somewhere, ma'am? Is there anywhere you'd like to go?"

"Home," she says finally. "I would like to go home, please."

He nods, slowly. "Yes, I think we can arrange that."

He takes her hand and they walk away from the water, through the trees, and she can make out the red of the morning.

*

Spock has the expression that indicates, through layers of calm scientific professionalism, that he's irritated at having his work interrupted. He hasn't, however, given vent to that irritation through a single barbed comment about human irrationality. Kirk notes this fact as somehow significant while McCoy paces the lab, his hands in constant motion, describing invisible patterns in dry sterile air.

"Bones," he says quietly, and McCoy looks straight at him. There's a bonelessness about him, a gooey contentment that borders on the obscene. His eyes are dimmed, and Kirk has a crazy desire to pick him up and shake his usual tension back into him.

"I figured it out," he says, the drawl especially pronounced, and for a second Kirk sees him impossibly younger, an intern running through the corridors of the Academy with eyes flashing in every passing glass-door reflection. "I figured it out."

"Doctor" – and to Kirk's trained ear, Spock's voice contains not a single note of exasperation, which means he's worried – "I would take it as a kindness if you would elaborate."

_And finish elaborating_, Kirk thinks, _and go away and stop bothering me_. Spock's dedication to science should serve as an example to everyone, but particularly in pursuit of a goal like this; standing in the spotless laboratory, Kirk is fairly sure that every label on every petri dish is painstakingly hand-catalogued. They still haven't had any success at isolating the means of transmission, and Kirk thinks Spock takes that as a personal insult.

"You won't find it," McCoy says, and he almost sounds happy. He's still pacing, still with a lazy rhythm to the roll of his muscles.

"What?" Kirk asks, more sharply than he meant to.

"The means of transmission." McCoy looks at Spock. "There isn't one. It doesn't always work like that. Nothing is easy, Spock. Nothing gets better if you ignore the symptoms. Could we really think that we could synthesise an antidote and be on our way? Does anything really come that easy?"

"Doctor" – and there it is, Kirk thinks with an obscure triumph, there it is, the note of exasperation – "I would hardly call _this_ easy." Spock is motioning at the piles of petri dishes, the notes, the endless chips full of data that are neatly stacked on the bench.

"I went for a walk," McCoy says, comfortable in his non sequitur. "I've walked around the world, I've walked around the ship. I fell asleep with all of you all around me, all with your everyday thoughts, your annoyances and your joys. I woke up and I went down to the planet, and I told you, I've figured it out."

"Bones!" Kirk snaps. "Get to the point or I'll have you relieved of duty." It's not meant to be harsh. He's worried, and a little wary of this man who drifts in and out of his space with a new and frightening ease.

"We send them home," McCoy says firmly. "Send them back to where they came from, tie them to the bed if we don't want them wandering off balconies, and we hold their hands in the night, and we hear their thoughts for what they are. And we wait it out. If they want to come back to us, they'll come."

"What is your scientific basis for this claim?" Spock asks, levelly.

"I've been there." McCoy is quiet, and for the first time, standing still. "I've been to that place, and I've come back. Any questions?"

Kirk opens his mouth and thinks better of it. Spock makes no move to say anything.

McCoy says, "You know where you can find me," and walks out.

Once he's gone, the silence in the room eases, becomes less thick with things unspoken. Kirk heaves the deepest sigh possible and says, "Well? What do you make of that?"

"I see two possibilities," Spock replies, after a moment. "Either Doctor McCoy's experiences on Sigma Eridani V have adversely affected his intellect, or they have not. Neither possibility precludes his being correct in this instance."

"You think he's right?" Kirk asks, surprised.

"That is not what I said. However" – Spock pauses – "his solution has intuitive appeal. There has, indeed, been no progress made in isolating the infectious agent. If, as the doctor surmises, the disease is a condition of the mind, perhaps the clues are to be found in each victim's previous life. It is quite possible that the precipitating factor should have been different in each case."

"_That's_ what he surmises? You got that from what he said?"

Spock merely looks at him. Kirk thinks about it and says, "You've got to remind me when I'm the only non-telepath in the room."

"Yes, Captain."

"Especially when playing poker" – and the door closes behind him before Spock can reply.

*

On the last day, one last patient makes one last bid for the depths.

"Stop fussing, T'Len," McCoy says, irritably. He's chilly, and there are drops of condensation on the tips of his eyelashes.

"I shall stop fussing, as you put it, when you stop walking into the lake, Doctor McCoy," she tells him, pulling a blanket around his shoulders, tucking in the edges with deft, efficient fingers. "I might make so bold as to suggest you have made something of a habit of it."

Concentrating as hard as he can, McCoy thinks about the water – about the cold, about the mist clinging to the trees, about the last people to be extricated from the reeds. About the water rising as the season changes, about each of them flown into the brightening sky, the signal beacons dying into darkness beneath so this place ceases to exist, smoothed back into the landscape as they all go home.

"Yes," T'Len says, aloud. "Yes. Well done, Doctor."

She settles the blanket and sits beside him. They are among the last to leave, waiting for the all-clear and the vanishing into the sky.

"So," McCoy says, eventually, preferring words, even now. "What happens now?

T'Len is thoughtful. "Where do you come from, Doctor McCoy?"

McCoy shrugs. "Earth-human born and bred, out here by way of the _Enterprise_."

She shakes her head. "Try again, Doctor. I have been to Earth."

"What, and I'm not a typical specimen?" McCoy spreads his hands in surrender. He is finding it hard, now, to dissemble: to lie, to exaggerate. To be other than an ungainly, human mirror of the truth of all things. "Perhaps."

"Earth is such a beautiful world," she says delicately. "I have seen its cities, its forests, the beauty of its deserts and its seascapes. Tell me where you come from, Doctor."

He smiles, slowly. "Is this by way of a prescription, T'Len?"

"Show me, if you like." She is smiling back at him, but with a familiar strength of purpose. A doctor's smile, he thinks, quick as a flash – the _it's for your own good smile_. She holds her hand up, pauses – he recognises that it asks for consent – and he takes it.

"I was born in Atlanta, Georgia," he said, and his voice has slowed, become honey-thick with Southern drawl.

She touches, gently, and he thinks about warmth. About warm air, rippling gently through curtains; about warm water splashing against skin. About a landscape rich with greenery, about cut leaves and the long, slow, sunbaked journey of rivers across land. About the sheer fecundity of life, about purple and pink flowers, about slow consonants falling from soft lips, about mint sprigs and ice frosting on a glass. About gnats, and snapping jaws, about humidity that gets into your head and into your blood and etched into your temper, about cotton and sweat and sticky palms.

And finally, the one word, over and over, _home_, and when he opens his eyes she has adjusted the blanket, and there is a tiny smile around her lips. "You love your home very much, Doctor."

"Is it obvious?" He's feeling grouchy, as though woken from an early-morning dream and made to get up and go to school. "It's a few miles distant from here all the same."

"Many millions. But you will return, is that not so?"

"Sooner or later." There's a flatness in his voice, and the beginnings of some black mood are settling in – disappointment, despair, but muted, dull. Perhaps an ordinary sulk. There is certainly a sulky taint to the shields that he puts up, soft like the blanket covering his head.

"Sooner." T'Len has the Vulcan gift for sounding definitive. "Sooner, Doctor. It is there – in the sunlight of your home, amidst the landscape that has worked its way into your bones – that you will draw in the tendrils of yourself once more, become one, become you."

"No more..." He taps his head, feeling suddenly heavy, desolate under the weight of it all.

"No more shielding." She nods. "No more need for it. And yet, yours is a natural aptitude. With training, you might become – great."

"I have a calling already." He looks up, catches her eyes. "I don't need to feel my patients' pain. It's better all around if I don't."

She laughs lightly. "Doctor McCoy, you would feel their pain with or without this gift. Do what you have to do, as you have always done."

Sitting back, he says, quietly, "T'Len. May I ask you a personal question?"

"Ask."

"You're..." McCoy hesitates, taking the mental equivalent of a deep breath. "You're unlike other Vulcans I've known. Your" – he pauses, plunges into it – "_emotions_ are different."

"Ah." She nods again, and to his relief, she doesn't seem offended. "You ask of Vulcans, but you know only Commander Spock well, is that so?"

"There have been others," McCoy says, "and I've met Spock's father, too. But it's only Spock I know well, that's true enough."

"Remember, Doctor, that Vulcans do not repress emotions. Nothing so inelegant. Nor do we suppress or destroy them. We control them. And for Commander Spock, science officer aboard the Enterprise, logic is fitting. But you understand what it is to have the calling I do." McCoy nods. "Well, then, I control my emotions. I may still employ them in service of my art, if there is such a call for them. Can you understand?"

McCoy is thinking about death, about triage, about priorities and hope and professional detachment, and says, simply, "Yes."

They sit in silence after that. When the moment comes for dematerialisation, the last thing to disappear is the feel of her mind on his, quiet and comfortable, silent like an old friend.

*

It ends on a held note, halfway through a refrain. McCoy finishes his work for the day, looks in on the only patient in sickbay – a crewman who fell into a bulkhead, is sleeping off a concussion and dreaming of peaches and cream – nods to Nurse Chapel and takes a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. And pauses on the threshold, suddenly lacking in deliberation; each step he takes through the ship is off-rhythm, a missed beat.

He finds Spock on the observation deck, standing next to the window, mere inches from the outside. McCoy thinks about that for a moment, thinks about the _Enterprise_, pitted against nothingness, insignificance, feels the chill of interstellar space resonate through his bones.

"Doctor McCoy." Spock is formal, acknowledging his presence with a nod. After a moment McCoy steps forward to stand beside him, looking out at the blur of stars in warp. He wonders for a dizzy minute if this is what that feels like, somersaulting alone through subspace. The thought echoes, silly and tinny against the implacable curve of glass.

Abruptly, Spock sighs, and the sound is oddly human. "When did it happen?" he asks, and there is still the hint of something alien in his voice.

McCoy smiles, wryly. "Four hours and forty minutes ago, right in the middle of a not-at-all-rousing chorus of 'Loch Lomond'."

"Explain," Spock says.

McCoy is still smiling as he sets the whisky bottle down at his feet. "I was giving Scotty a check-up, nothing particularly important, and it was just before he went on shift, he'd just woken up." A pause, while he looks out at the swirling stars. "He was throwing off a dream. There was a song still stuck in his head."

Spock nods. He understands, but McCoy goes on anyway, happy to talk, to fill the cavernous silence. "And he stopped on the middle of a note, like losing a signal in atmosphere. And just like that, I can't hear them any more."

Spock says, gently, "And now, Doctor McCoy?"

McCoy shrugs. "I go and get roaringly drunk, I expect. Certify myself unfit for a while. Get used to my own company again." As he says it, he feels pulled apart by space, by spaces, by disconnection. The clamour, he thinks clearly, of the hundreds of voices that aren't there. "If I can."

"You can," Spock says, definitively. He has that talent, McCoy decides, of shaping reality in his own logical image, whereas McCoy adapts to blood and bodies breaking, the changing contours of a changing world.

"I can," McCoy says, doubtfully, and picks up the bottle. "Thank you, Spock."

"For what?" Spock asks – but there is enough of the gift left, just, for the thread of amusement to manifest, and McCoy smiles again.

He turns to go, pauses. "One more thing, though, Spock. I was told this would only happen when I returned home."

"Returning home is not a simple business, Doctor." Spock has turned away, face lit only by starlight, and McCoy leaves without a further word.

On the way back to his cabin, he's thinking about twilights and deserts, about mint and sunlight, about a porch swing years ago, about the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, about whiskey. For a few days after that he doesn't get out of bed, but he's getting the shape of himself again, and he'll be okay.


End file.
